Reviews
David Nice
The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend. John Eliot Gardiner proved better than anyone in last night's Prom that this splendidly lopsided "dramatic legend" can only be weakened by its many stagings; all the drama is in the music, and especially in the orchestra, from rollicking country dances and fanfaring Hungarians through to the shrieking night birds on the ride to the abyss and the six harps dappling the plains of heaven in what for modern tastes is a quite unnecessary "Epilogue in Heaven" for redeemed Marguerite.Gardiner is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” plays as Charlize Theron’s Lorraine Broughton makes her entrance. She’s the last Cold War super-spy, a female Bond sent to Berlin as the Wall crumbles. “Killer Queen”, prominent on early trailers, would have done just as well. Daniel Craig in Casino Royale is the last time an action star made such a startling bow.We meet Broughton before her post-Berlin debrief from suspicious spooks including her harassed MI6 boss Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and CIA counterpart Kurzfeld (John Goodman). As she immerses her bruised body in an ice-bath which she scoops to put Read more ...
David Kettle
Rhinoceros ★★★★★Marketed by an image of a Trump-quiffed and -besuited pachyderm, Zinnie Harris’s new version of Ionesco’s absurdist 1959 comedy is one of the International Festival flagship shows for 2017, a collaboration between Edinburgh’s own Royal Lyceum Theatre and Istanbul’s DOT Theatre. And with its wild, scabrous humour and its blazing, furious energy, it doesn’t disappoint. This is a Rhinoceros very much for our times, with fake news, mistrust of immigrants and even a USA gone to the dogs under a tinpot dictator all firmly referenced, in amongst Ionesco’s tale of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips ready: spot the difference between a woman who passes herself as a doctor and a woman who passes herself off as a Doctor.Trust Me, among other things, is a timely shop window for Whittaker’s abilities. The plot requires her to play her own private game of doctors and nurses. At the start she’s Cath Hardacre, a ballsy ward sister who makes the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Only man is vile, goes the hymn, and yet humankind has always imagined ideal societies where people care for one another, everyone has access to anything necessary physical and emotional well-being, and all is for the best – without irony – in the best of all possible worlds.It may never have been achieved in reality, but in the first of a three-part documentary Utopia: In Search of the Dream (BBC Four) Professor Richard Clay, an art historian and Newcastle’s first professor of digital humanities (sic), led us through a memorable discussion of the ideas and ideals of utopias and importance of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
A Prom of unrelenting momentum began promisingly with Beethoven, and the false start that opens his First Symphony. On this showing, Kirill Karabits has coached his Bournemouth musicians in the classical repertoire with a dash and flair that brings to mind a golden era for the orchestra under the stewardship of Rudolf Barshai in the 1980s. Metronome-mark tempi even outstripped his Russian predecessor, though diligent observance of accents, and delight in some of Beethoven’s naughty-boy antics, did not fully compensate for a pervasive lack of weight. We didn’t get much beyond the idea of the Read more ...
David Nice
"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of rival interest-groups at the beginning of young Tsar Peter I's reign, though I like to think that newcomers to Khovanshchina ("The Khovansky Business") would have got the message about each formidable personage and scene without them, so vivid was this realisation of the way Musorgsky characterises roistering princes, humble scribes and calm Old Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Hamilton is positively in love with his subject, and writes with verve and enthusiasm, yet grounds it on vast research with primary and secondary sources, all impeccably noted.The whole, organised into 40 pithy chapters with titles such as “In the Painting Room”, is like a piece of stage craft come to life. Hamilton sweeps the reader into the world of 18th century Suffolk, smoke-filled Bath – all those coal fires Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to Pete Frame’s book Rock Family Trees, Fairport Convention had 15 different line-ups between 1968 and 1978, the period covered by the new box set Come All Ye – The First 10 Years. Fairport Convention #7, extant from November 1971 to February 1972, featured no one from the first three iterations of the band, which had taken them up to June 1969. Evidently, the actuality of Fairport Convention is fluid.Despite this, there is an established and (relatively) clearly defined arc. One traced by Come All Ye. Their first album, made with Judy Dyble as their singer, was a response to Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The sixth in a series of crime novels that began in 2011 with Or the Bull Kills You and which introduced readers to Chief Inspector Max Cámara, Fatal Sunset opens with our anarchistic hero summoned to see Rita Hernández, newly installed Commissioner of Valencia’s Policia Nacional.Officious, devoutly Catholic and eager to make her mark, clearing up the financial and administrative mess bequeathed to her by her (male) predecessor, Hernández is determined to fix the “insolent” Cámara and his sidekick Torres once and for all, to belittle him sufficiently that he leaves the Jefatura. Sacking him Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A 19th-century silver and wood pot in which to make chocolate, pertly graceful; 17th-century blue and white Delftware; a Chinese calligraphy panel; a 19th-century carved wooden god from the Ivory Coast; a bronze and gold earth goddess from South-East Asia. These are but a tiny sampling from the multitude of objects with which Matisse surrounded himself in his studio(s). A treasure trove of objects that Matisse once owned has been brought together for this Royal Academy show, combined with the work that they inspired.Matisse thought to ennoble the humblest of objects, to find delight in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Before reuniting us in high spirits with a pair of much-loved old friends, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Brahms's Second Symphony, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi at the Proms took us into a darker, and unexpectedly affecting, place. Written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Flamma by Järvi’s fellow-Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür evokes the mysterious, and terrifying, power of fire with a nod to its sacred role in Aboriginal culture.In June, just on the other side of Kensington from the Royal Albert Hall, Londoners witnessed and felt that power in the most horrific Read more ...